Condé Nast is latest target of unpaid internship lawsuits

Just a little more than a month after a court told Hearst Corp.’s former unpaid interns that they couldn’t pursue a class action, intern rage turned toward the other giant of magazine publishing: Condé Nast.

Two former Condé Nast interns—Matthew Leib, who interned at The New Yorker in 2009 and 2010, and Lauren Ballinger, who worked for W Magazine in 2009—sued Condé Nast on Thursday in a Manhattan district court, with the now-classic argument that the publisher’s intern program violates Department of Labor guidelines by not paying its interns minimum wage. The guidelines state that interns must not be replacements for employees, or bring advantage to the company, unless they are paid.

Leib claims he made $300 to $500 for the two summers he worked at The New Yorker, editing, reviewing submissions and maintaining the magazine’s online cartoon database. Ballinger says she made $12 a day working in W’s accessories department. They both claim to have made less than $1 an hour in their positions. Ballinger told the New York Times that she filed the lawsuit because W did not give a recommendation to her school, The American University in Paris, which she needed to get credit.